Tell about some good advice your father gave you.
Dad was a rancher growing up and even though his parents were LDS he picked up the habit of smoking. When mom came along when he was 32 she was able to change his ways and he gave up smoking. Well his advice to me was to never start but if I wanted to he wanted to be there with me. His knowledge of what it was like and that I wouldn’t really want to get a habit like that was enough for me to never make it even a temptation.
Tell a favorite memory of your father.
The favorite memory of my father that comes to mind right now is each morning when he would come down to my room and wake me up. He let me sleep a little longer while he went and brought in the coal for the furnace and then he would tell me to get upp again and with the door open begin clinkering the furnace, in other words affair amount of noise. I would then get up and we would go out and milk the cows and do the rest of the chores together. He never sent me out to do them alone but was always there to help me each morning. At night I usually did them by myself since he was still at work when I would need to do them.
Where did you go to swim and what kind of suits did you wear.
First we wore swimming trunks that were fairly short and tight on the legs. We would have considered what we wear today as boxer shorts back then. I went swimming nearly every afternoon in an irrigation canal that ran above our home. It was about two feet deep in the deepest spots and the most popular thing to do was to float on inner tubes in the canal. We would sometimes just hang on to the tubes and paddle our feet but the canal wasn’t deep enough to do that without slapping your toes on the rocks every so often. We would usually carry the tubes about a half mile to the bridge and then jump from the bridge into the water with the tubes under us. (Don’t think that we were super brave jumping from the bridge because it was only three feet or so above the water and we couldn’t jump from the upstream side since our tubes with us on them wouldn’t fit under the bridge. If we really went to a swimming pool then we would have to travel for a half an hour to the Roosevelt city pool or 45 minutes to the Price city pool. It wasn’t until I was out of high school that we had Starvation lake to swim in just upstream from town.
How did you learn to swim?
By going with Beverly Caldwell, a professional lifeguard, nearly everyday for the summer after graduation. We went to Starvation reservoir , Roosevelt and Price city pools with her coaching my every move until I learned to swim well enough to earn my Swimming and Lifesaving merit badges for scouting.
Relate your happiest memory of your youth.
Wow, how do you take so many happy memories and try to chose just one. I suppose that if I did try I would probably end up with a conglomeration of several as one.
There was one memory that might not be considered as extremely happy but a good memory none-the-less. It was one time when Lynn and I went to help Uncle Mont drive the sheep from the Indian Canyon ranch to town. I was on a horse the entire day and knew it had been a lot longer than I was used to doing. It was a lot of fun though and something that the older brothers had a lot of chances to do before I was old enough to do it. I think it was actually the last year that Mont ever moved the sheep down the canyon with horses.
Tell a childhood memory about a death that affected you.
The first one would have been President Kennedy’s murder in November of 1963. That affected us since he was our President and we didn’t really know him other than what we saw of him on national TV.
However the first one probably affected me the most was ‘”Nana’s” funeral in December 1963. She was my grandmother Poulson and I used to go to her place everyday after school until mom or dad would come to pick us up. I loved her and missed her an awful lot.
Tell another memory about a parade.
I will tell about parades here in Mapleton this time. They were much the same as those in Duchesne, again small Utah town with small Utah town traditions that persist to this day. The Mapleton ones were a little different however because they always ended at the city park and had activities all morning including breakfast, games and displays. There were also dances at night on the tennis court by the park with talent shows also held during the day. Loren won a bike at a raffle one year at that celebration.
If you were ever in a parade, tell about it.
Duchesne was a small Utah town with small Utah town customs and with that were traditions around some of the holidays. I remember a parade every year from the time I was very little and riding either in a small red flier wagon, on a trailor or on a bicycle. We always wore pioneer style clothing and it was always the primary that hosted the parade. Later during my high school years I would ride on a hay wagon with the school band. We didn’t have a marching band because we didn’t need one since the school was too small for a football team and marching bands were not used for basketball half time entertainment.
What was your first purchase using you own money?
Candy and or treats. I was young enough to not really earn enough money to purchase anything huge but I sure had enough to get candy on the way to primary after school let out. During the summers when I took summer school then I would stop and buy an ice cream cone or something to eat while riding home on my bike.
Tell about other paying jobs you had as a youth.
Actually I guess my first paying job had to have been the money I received from selling milk to neighbors. I sold about 8 gallons a week at 50 cents a gallon. Dad let me keep the money even though he did part of the milking as well. I used some of that money earned to help buy my first camera as well . mom and dad paid for most of it instead of paying for a senior trip.
